How You Break Out of Your Creative Silences?

Writer's Block is a mother fucker. Any kind of creative block sucks, honestly.

For my first collection of stories, I leaned on the more dark and surreal imagery I could find on the internet. Mostly as reference or influence, never as story-starters. But, sometimes the image would prompt a question within me that I'd try to follow until the narrative fizzled out and I needed to start writing in order to find its eventual end.

For my second collection, I found myself reading a lot more. Not necessarily fiction that was more heavily on the love and romance and relationship side of things, just reading MORE. That I was living in San Francisco and was stuck on public transit for at least an hour every day helped me read more pages than if I'd been driving to work and back daily. The influx of literature as a whole seemed to help bring about some fuller, more expositional stories that felt pregnant with what I would consider my best writing at that point.

Now that I'm working on my third collection, I've been focused more on movies and TV, watching things like "Mandy" or the 3rd season of Twin Peaks, purely to get into the vibe I'm trying to achieve with the collection. I'm not reading and I'm not really utilizing imagery to help move things along. I've been sitting on some ideas for awhile, and many of them are coming to fruition on the page, but I also haven't read a single book this year, which is fucking terrible, y'all. Legit awful.

At play is also the nature of bad happenings around my life the last few months, along with the actual writing of some 14 stories this year alone, which has made me feel super productive. The holidays tend to be creatively dull for me, what with all the company Christmas parties and the family time and then the parties with friends. Getting back into that creative swing once all that ends can be tough.

Does anyone else find the holidays a hard time to create? Or are you bolstered by the frantic nature of the time of year? No matter the time of year, how do you get out of your creative ruts and get back into a productive swing?